Our mission
We're making Africa the first cashless continent.
In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.
We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across six countries and are growing fast.
Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in.....
How you’ll help us achieve it
You’ll lead our Support Product team, which builds and maintains the tools used by our support agents to solve customer problems.
In a very price-sensitive industry, support is a major cost center. In the next few years, we’re looking to transform our support team to solve customer problems quickly and well. We want to give agents the information they need to solve customer problems efficiently and enforce company policies consistently, enable users to self-serve 24/7 via chatbots available in-app and through messaging services, and create systems for funneling feedback to product teams.
You’ll supervise five engineers and work closely with our Support PM and one data analyst to build the tools that make all of this possible and ensure continuous uptime of our support tooling as we move to the new system.
As an engineering manager, you will:
- Collaborate with the product manager to prioritize and scope work
- Support and mentor your teammates to become more effective engineers and colleagues.
- Design and implement processes (e.g. status updates, reflection and learning, incident response) that allow the team to operate smoothly.
- Interface with software vendors
- Ensure that technical approaches align with business needs
- Create a positive and collaborative team culture and work environment
You might be a good fit if you...
- You care a lot about working on software whose mission you believe in. Working at Wave positively impacts millions of lives through fast and cheap mobile money services. By helping us stay reliable and scalable, you’ll have a big impact on the lives of lots of underserved people.
- You want to be part of an engineering culture that values simple and straightforward architecture over cutting-edge, shiny tech. This helps us keep Wave simple to operate and makes it easier to achieve our reliability goals.
- You want to work on a team where it’s easy to collaborate. Our mission-focused culture makes sure that every one you’ll work with is here primarily for the same reason—to make our users’ lives better. That alignment makes it easy to work with anyone across the company, even if there’s some tension between your short-term goals. This is especially helpful for teams like infrastructure that collaborate closely with many other product teams.
- You’re excited to work closely with operational teams to get feedback on changes and not be afraid to experiment and change directions. One of our company values is Maximize your Rate of Learning, and that value is especially relevant as we build our new support vision. We’ll be looking for earlier ways to test hypotheses and can’t get too attached to unproven ideas. You’ll work regularly with our support reps and support leadership to understand how our tools are working for them and to troubleshoot problems as they come up.
Requirements
- You’re in a timezone between UTC-1 and +3 or willing to align your work hours to that timezone.
- You’re willing to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs).
Fluent in English
- You’re comfortable with full-stack web development.
- At least two years of experience managing a software engineering team
- You have demonstrable people management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
- You have experience managing the day-to-day work of an engineering team: facilitating meetings, assigning work, identifying when projects are stuck, ensuring we learn from our experience
- You have experience working closely with a product manager to set OKRs and to scope and assign engineering tasks.
Key Details
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access as long as you have work authorization.
- Every year, you’ll travel to Africa for a one-week immersion trip. (Wave covers all costs.)
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your experience level and location, we offer a salary range in our L5 level (or local equivalent) plus a generous equity package.
- Major benefits:
- Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country)
- 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
- Unlimited vacation with a 20-day minimum requirement
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
About engineering at Wave
We value:
- Boring technology
- Simple, predictable designs
- Deeply understanding our tools and systems
- Being tenacious in the face of tricky problems
- Constantly Trying to improve as engineers and colleagues
Our team
- We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte D'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Gambia, and Uganda, plus remote team members spread across the world.
- We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
- We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
- We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
- In 2022, we were on Y Combinator's top 50 companies by revenue.
How to apply
Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.
We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals.
Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
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